A SONG FOR NATIONAL UNITY DAY, NOVEMBER 4 — PUT AND CALL ON THE RITZ

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It happened at the same time in February, when the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was rehearsing members of the
Pussy Riot group, recording voice-over of a script against then
presidential candidate Vladimir Putin , and fabricating a
performance in Christ the Saviour Cathedral for which two members
of the group are serving 2-year prison terms, and one is on
probation. The BBC has acknowledged “errors” were made by
their Moscow correspondent Steven Rosenberg in his compilations
and broadcasts about the incident, the prequels and sequels.

This YouTube version of the February 21 incident has recorded 75,110 views. The BBC rehearsal version,
posted on February 20, has so far drawn 84,336 views. An
extra English-language version has recorded just 3,132 views. And
this is the YouTube clip posted by Pussy Riot itself. The
views total 2,364,707.

On February 26, five days after the Cathedral incident but before
the arrests of three Pussy Riot members, this version of the
Irving Berlin song, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, was staged across town
in Moscow. Berlin (Beilin, b. May 22, 1888, at Tyumen) wrote the
song in 1929. This version was filmed on Sparrow Hills, in front
of the Moscow State University tower. Here is the original and first posting of the
video on the YouTube. The posting indicates that so far there
have been 10,558,987 views.

If the YouTube data are correct, the views of “Puttin’ on the
Ritz” have outnumbered the Pussy Riot “performance” by 4.2 times.
Rebroadcast, remastered and pirated versions of both clips have
been posted elsewhere on the internet, which are uncountable. It
is also technically possible that with botnet and spamming
techniques, the number of views of the links can be inflated. But
it is also obvious – a vastly larger number of Russians have
wanted to see “Puttin’ on the Ritz” than have felt the same about
Pussy Riot.

That’s not the impression which continues to be fostered outside
Russia, especially by the Guardian newspaper of London. Ahead of
Sunday’s celebration of Russia’s Unity Day holiday, the Guardian
editorialized on the continuing importance of Pussy Riot as an
indicator of Putin’s state of mind, or loss of it. “Someone in
Putin’s inner circle,” the newspaper reports, “sensed an
opportunity to turn the tables on a protest movement fired up by
rigged parliamentary elections last year. A conflict which had
until then pitted the young, urban middle class against an
ageing, corrupt and super-rich bureaucracy, was diverted into the
challenge of a fringe group against a self-defined moral
majority… The conflicts Putin has generated since his re-election
– youth versus the orthodox church, liberals versus
conservatives, westerners versus nationalists – all stoke the
motor of anti-Americanism… Putin’s crackdown has Russia watchers
scratching their heads. There are conflicting theories: he is
vindictive; he is bored, disengaged and out of touch; he is more
insecure than he seems. The last thesis bears scrutiny.”

The call to scrutiny is a two-way street. What apparently doesn’t
bear comparable investigation on the part of the London media is
how much of the Pussy Riot story is a figment of the self-same
media. This is just as evident at Private Eye, the London
fortnightly of investigative journalism, which is a constant
critic of the Guardian’s record for truth-telling, and of the BBC
too. As the Eye notes regarding the latest scandal of BBC
wrongdoing, and revenge on the part of former employees, “there
comes a point in every BBC scandal when the story eventually
disappears up its own arse.” That’s to say, the investigative
journalists turn on each other.

There’s one tender arse, though, up which no rough investigative
reporter is permitted to probe. That’s Private Eye itself, and
its editor Ian Hislop. Their part in the promotion of the fictive
Pussy Riot story was reported here. That was
back in September. Unknown to this investigator at the time was
that Hislop was completing work on a BBC programme which was
scheduled to be broadcast on October 2. This came in three
episodes entitled “Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional
History of Britain.” According to the BBC’s promo, “Ian Hislop asks when and why we British
have bottled up or let out our feelings and how this has affected
our history.”

Could it have been bottling around his own mouth that had caused
Hislop’s silence on the Pussy Riot fabrication of his own, two
weeks earlier? Stiffness in another of his joints?

So through telephone and email, Hislop was asked this week to
answer these fresh questions: “was Mr Hislop owed a sum of money
by the BBC for his participation in that programme? In the
aggregate of Mr Hislop’s annual income does the BBC quantum make
a larger proportion than Mr Hislop’s salary for directing Private
Eye?”

Reply — stiff upper-lip, no words emanating through which.

But there is a parallel story to be uncovered about the “Puttin’
on the Ritz”. According to a semi-anonymous blog posted by
“Artyom”, a week after the filming and posting, the song and
dance routines had been choreographed by professional dancers,
carefully rehearsed, filmed with several takes, and with
participants paid by the producers. This
account also claims that those involved were told the film
had a general political purpose – it was intended, Artyom says,
to “persuade people to come to the polls. Not for any particular
candidate, but for a [general] reason. They proposed the idea –
the young should not sit at home, but go out and go to the
polls.”

The source also claims that he spotted something on the film clip
he didn’t hear during the performance. This is at the very end of
the film, repeated twice on the soundtrack, and lip-synched by
the bride. “Just now when watching the video… you can clearly
hear the phrase ‘Putin molodets’ [Putin, a great guy!]. I was in
on the recording, and while that was going on it was absolutely
not heard. And close-up shots of the bride were filmed again
separately… And she says exactly that phrase. On the day the guys
couldn’t understand why there were so many takes of her.”

Artyom concludes that no lies were told, no deception.
Nonetheless, he says the other participants will “be more careful
next time…will be smarter.” It isn’t clear what role Artyom
played in simulating the flashmob, or what he will do next time.
It also isn’t clear what he thinks of the election of Putin.

One additional point about the commercialization of these two
little films, with their apparently big political messages:
Dmitry Kravtsov, spokesman for the Russian Patent Office,
Rospatent, confirms today that an application has been lodged to
register the words, “Pussy Riot” as a trademark and rent-charging
asset. The application was submitted by Web Bio, a film-making
company belonging to the wife of Mark Feigin, one of the lawyers
of Pussy Riot. Kravtsov says the application has been rejected.

Yekaterina Samutsevich, the one of the three jailed Pussy Riot
members to have been released on probation, has told Kommersant
that Feigin’s interest in commercializing the brand-name was not
authorized by her, nor by Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria
Alyokhina. Feigin has responded: “In April, when they were still
in prison and no one was interested in the brand, they asked in
writing that the brand be registered under the first immediately
available firm. This firm was my wife’s film company. When this
whole conflict arose between the girls, I, along with Polozov and
Volkova [lawyers representing the group], absolutely and
permanently refused to have anything to do with this issue.”
According to Feigin, Samutsevich has a commercial interest of her
own, and that she is in competition for the rights and
peripherals with Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov. For the
time being, the asset is reportedly valued at $1 million.

Read the original article on Dances With Bears. John Helmer is the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Copyright 2012.